Over the years there has been an increasing trend in the housing market to construct homes having three- or four-car garages. Business, particularly automobile repair shops, have for many years used multiple garage door configuration. In many instances, either for reasons of aesthetics or practicality, the garages have multiple independent doors generally corresponding to the number of cars that may be housed within the garage. Each door, therefore, requires its own barrier movement operator, or garage door opener (GDO). Presently, a homeowner or business owner is required to install each GDO as a separate unit, with each unit having its own switch module for controlling the opening and closing of the door and for controlling other features such as enabling or disabling a signal response inhibit feature, also referred to as vacation mode or lock mode, for preventing hand-held transmitters from controller the barrier operator or turning the GDO overhead light off and on. Therefore, for example, in a home having a three-car garage with three independent doors and accordingly three GDOs, three different wall units are required for controlling the GDOs.
If the owner of a dwelling having multiple operators needs to turn on the overhead light for each GDO in the garage, he is required not only to press the light button on the first switch module, but the second and third or more overhead light buttons on each switch module to turn on all the lights. Similarly, a homeowner wanting to set each GDO to response inhibit mode must manually program each GDO one at a time. To shut off the overhead lights or to turn off response inhibit mode on each GDO, the homeowner reverses the above process and manually turns off each of the overhead lights and/or disables response inhibit mode on each GDO one at a time.
What is needed, therefore, is one or more switch modules capable of controlling the movement of the multiple barrier operators independently and a user accessible control switch also capable of enabling and disabling one or more convenience features for all the operators.